SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER

T.C.F. Crew "I Ain't The One" (1993)

Tone: “The industry used to be broken into tiers. You had your hip-hop, then you had your R&B, and then you had the pop. It’s not broken down like that anymore, you kind of have everything together.

“At that time, we were hip-hop producers and anything hip-hop was really underground. You had your few guys who broke through, like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. But those were guys who we wouldn’t even think about producing, like, ‘I’m not touching that shit.’ We went to a level and we produced hip-hop and we had to break into the next level in order to be successful producers.”

Poke: “When we got to the top tier of the hip-hop, which was the G Rap records, we really didn’t realize that that’s what those were. When people started calling us wanting to work with us we were like, ‘Really? Y’all wanna work with us?’ We didn’t realize the benchmark that we crossed when those records did what they did.”

Tone: “Our first transition into the R&B world was through Cold Chillin’ with the T.C.F. Crew.”

Poke: “That record was huge.”

Tone: “That was a huge record for Cold Chillin’ and for us. That opened up the doors for R&B, like, ‘Who made that record?’”

Poke: “When we crossed into the R&B world, people were surprised, like, ‘You guys make hip-hop, you don’t do that stuff.’ When they seen that, they’d be like, ‘Holy shitballs. Y’all do R&B?’”